Russia Deploying Troops for Temporary Dagestan Reinforcement

March 19 (Bloomberg) -- Russia is sending a “temporary
detachment” of troops into the southern region of Dagestan,
whose border lies about 200 kilometers (124 miles) north of
Iran, to combat terrorism, the Interior Ministry said.

“We are talking about a temporary deployment and
coordination to prevent and counter terrorism and extremism
across the whole territory of Dagestan,” Vyacheslav Makhmudov,
a spokesman for the regional Interior Ministry, said from the
republic’s capital city, Makhachkala.

About 1,000 troops are being moved from the nearby region
of Chechnya to form temporary police units in municipalities
with “complicated criminal conditions,” said Magomed
Baachilov, the secretary of Dagestan’s state security council.
The realignment of forces was ordered by Interior Minister
Rashid Nurgaliev, with Oleg Kizhayev, a police colonel, named in
charge of the ministry detachment in Dagestan, the Interior
Ministry’s main directorate for the North Caucasus said on its
website today.

The authorities were deploying 20,000 to 25,000 federal
troops from Khankala, the main Russian army base in Chechnya,
according to reports published in Caucasian Knot, a Moscow-based
news and analysis group that tracks the situation in the North
and South Caucasus, and the weekly Dagestani publication
Chernovik, which cited unidentified local law-enforcement
officials. A convoy of armored personnel carriers and military
vehicles was seen moving toward southern Dagestan from March 14
to March 17, the reports said.

Separatist Insurgency

The North Caucasus has been the scene of separatist
violence since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Federal forces
fought two wars against rebels in Chechnya, and violence has
been flaring in neighboring Dagestan, with a border shootout
reported last month, a suicide bombing on March 6 and an attack
on a local polling station during the March 4 presidential
election. The government blames continuing violence on Islamist
fighters and insurgents.

Law-enforcement agencies killed 171 militants and arrested
211 in Dagestan last year, with another eight surrendering
without a fight, said Baachilov of the region’s state security
council. One hundred “active members” of the insurgency remain
after 15 have been killed in the first two months of this year,
he said.

Vladimir Putin, then prime minister under late President
Boris Yeltsin, sent ground troops into Chechnya in 1999 after
four bombings of apartment buildings in Russia in September that
year and an attack by Chechen fighters in August on Dagestani
villages, which were occupied in an attempt to form an Islamic
republic. Putin, who won a six-year term in the Kremlin in the
March 4 election, served as president between 2000 and 2008.